A log of what the team has been up to. Transparent log of team planning and collaboration. Read this as a guide to time spent and as documentation of work
The promotional website of the application
The final prototype of the application
There are three ways to use this:
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Laptop with touch screen:
a. Navigate to the website in Google Chrome
b. Open the developer tools
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Android phone with Google Now launcher:
a. Navigate to the website in Google Chrome
b. Open the settings menu and select "Add to homescreen"
c. Open the app from your homescreen (Note: If it doesn't appear, your launcher may not support this feature, try google now launcher)
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Mobile phone
a. Navigate to the website in Google Chrome
##Summary Today's news cannot compete with entertainment.
Attempts have been made to merge the two, but the resulting media are often vapid and sensationalist. We need a new platform that leverages the mobile era, engages people on a visceral level, and actually informs them.
Hot-Take is the next evolution in social video news.
With its non-intrusive mobile form, the interest in and addiction to the platform comes from its inherently engaging nature, not its clickbait or nagging notifications. Its mobile first experience is designed to provide a heavily touch-based tiling video display system, a system that leverages the ease of use of mobile design.
In order to further define our target audience and filter out those it isn't intended for, Hot-Take exploits the their current familiarity with the tiling interface of Snapchat. Additionally, in order to appeal to users, engagement is very explicit and non-disruptive. The app tries to not visibly or surreptitiosly take choices away from the user.
Hot-Take wants to bring the news to the Snapchat and Instagram generation by giving users the same shot of rewarding dopamine, but with stories that are actually worth their time.
It's killer feature is the way it makes use of comments. Rather having to sift through the trash at the bottom of some clickbait article, comments are ranked by vote and linked to specific parts of the video. When you see something interesting happen on the video, you can guage the number of responses thanks to the on-screen heatmap, and then swipe up to see comments related to that exact period of time.
##Process See captain's log for more details
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Establish problem
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Create whiteboard prototype
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Create html prototype to test the core functionality
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Create digital prototype to test small features
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Run user testing and iterate
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Create react-native prototype to test the technology and tile-based navigation
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Create final html prototype
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Run user testing to determine future improvements
Old media is losing its grip on today’s population, and with it, people are becoming less informed. Our proposal is an app that gives people a hot-take on real news stories and events in a way that is not only engrossing, but that engenders conversation.
It’s Twitch.tv meets Snapchat, for news 😉
Many people are uninterested in reading an article for two minutes, but are more than happy to spend half an hour scrolling through an instagram feed or watching someone play video games.
We want our application to feel as immediately rewarding as taking a selfie or swiping left and right through Tinder, but still be informative and have as much depth and intrigue as news is able to offer.
The core of our application is based on video, and a timestamp-based commenting system. Users can swipe left and right to change videos and up and down to vote on them. Votes are used to predict content that users want to see in the future, along with determining the order of videos. Users can interact with the video by commenting at particular time or selecting snips of the video to share. When watching the video, comments appear at their correlated time and a heatmap is visible of the aggregated snippets.
We will be targeting teens and millennials, mostly people that don’t access traditional forms of news-media. We want to be engaging people that only have a few moments to see what’s up, want to be entertained by their news, and want to participate in the conversation.
The aim behind our application and the processes involved in creating it is to expose people to news, allow them to be involved in it, and to have a novel and engrossing experience in a short period of time.
Our application’s initial design and goals take inspiration from a number of existing applications and services.
- Snapchat
- Stories Feature and directional tile-based navigation
- Twitch.tv
- Live commenting
- Consuming video en masse
- Soundcloud
- Timestamp based commenting
- Genius
- Annotation of external content
- Reddit
- Virality
- Curation through voting system
- Medium
- Highlighting important parts of content
- Youtube
- Serving video content
- Recommendation system
- Panda TV
- Real-live communication and comment
Our application differs from these applications by being entirely mobile focused with emphasis on time. Other applications, such as Twitch or Medium, are built for a user base that has time to consume lots of content in an extended period of time. Hot-Take interactions take only a handful of minutes and show only the most important things. To achieve this content is only a couple of minutes long, the heat map shows the most popular parts, and visible comments directly correlate to what's on screen.
The depth of user interaction is also a lot deeper than other news aggregations. For example reddit allows sharing of news links and media and community response through commenting. Hot-Take allows users fine grained control over which segment of the news they want to talk about. The heatmap also allows the user base as a whole to decide what the most important parts of the video are.
| ID | s43983687 |
|---|---|
| Role | Design and content |
| Degree | Master of Computer Science |
| ID | s43944875 |
|---|---|
| Role | Back-end and native code |
| Degree | Bachelor of Information Technology |
| ID | s43587713 |
|---|---|
| Role | Front-end and protoyping |
| Degree | Bachelor of Information Technology |
Decisions will be made collaboratively or without consensus through a team vote. As there are only three members in the team this will always yield a result.
Any conflicts between team members will be resolved through discussion as soon as they happen. The member not involved will act as a mediator. When a resolution has been agreed upon it will be monitored and if not upheld the conflict will be reviewed again. If conflict continues it will be brought up with the tutors or course coordinator.
Poor performance will be an issue if team members don’t get their allocated work completed as specified in the Plan. Offending members will have to complete additional work in proportional to the work they were supposed to do.
Meetings will be held during the workshop sessions on Wednesday 4pm along with ‘virtual’ slack meetings when necessary.
All files will be stored on github and will make use of github’s inbuilt version control systems. Internal files, such as brainstorming, will be stored on google drive.
Slack will be used for all communication outside workshop sessions. Slack’s excellent plugin and bot functionality allows integration with github and can provide organisational notifications for improved productivity. Zenhub will be used to manage tasks and issues as it directly integrates with git and is very feature rich.
There will be four stages during the development cycle of the application: research, requirements, design, and construction. It is not the intention of this team to have completed this cycle once during the semester, but to continue to complete it as we further iterate upon our design.
Research is not limited to gathering information through passive means. We will be developing a number of prototypes during development, and these prototypes will provide necessary information to adjust the scope of the application and allow for further investigation of requirements after we use them to do some test on people.
The process of gathering requirements involves background research, context investigation and problem space definition.
Our requirements will be gathered through the following techniques:
- Lead user interviews
- To gather information about those that we are interested in targeting the most
- Camera studies
- To gather information about the processes involved in interacting with the application
- History interview
- To gather information about changes in user’s past experiences with social media and news
- Process mapping
- To confirm the user interface being designed is appropriate
The design will involve a number of mobile and technologies.
During early prototyping stages, web technologies will be utilised because of their simplicity and the team member’s familiarity with them. During latter stages, native code will be used in order to provide more natural input options.
- Gather requirements
- Implement core functionality in desktp chrome extension
- Design basic app
- Connect application to content
- Gather feedback
- Implement final prototype
Using the techniques outlined in the requirements section of the plan, we will gain understanding of the needs of our users, the problem space, and the intentions for our application.
We will create a basic live-commenting system that interacts with existing videos like youtube. We will use this design to do further user testing and examine the core mechanic behind our application.
We will develop a basic implementation of our application to be used in further requirements gathering and user analysis studies. This application will be implemented in a simple cross-platform framework like React native, Cordova, or Xamarin
Using various APIs, we will connect our application to video content to simulate the experience one might have when using the application.
Using our basic application, we will run process mapping and camera studies on users to test how they will use it and how they feel about it, whether the core mechanics are intuitive, and address any flaws in our design.
During this final stage, small changes will be added and further user-testing will be done as required.
This is where stand-up reports will be logged with the following format:
| Week | #8 |
|---|---|
| Team member name | Adam |
| What did I do since last meeting? | Created desktop demonstration |
| What will I do now until the next meeting? | Move development side over to react-native |
| What is stopping me from getting stuff done? | Unfamiliarity with ZenHub |
| Week | #8 |
|---|---|
| Team member name | Zac |
| What did I do since last meeting? | Created wireframes and mockups |
| What will I do now until the next meeting? | Do some user testing, iterate and begin react-native work |
| What is stopping me from getting stuff done? | Unfamiliarity with ZenHub |
| Week | #8 |
|---|---|
| Team member name | Fang Wan |
| What did I do since last meeting? | Design interface |
| What will I do now until the next meeting? | built prototype via react-native and do some user test |
| What is stopping me from getting stuff done? | Unfamiliarity with ZenHub |
Social networks, Mobile Social Software, Information Sharing, Natural User Interfaces, Awareness
summary, commentary